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Sunday, April 12, 2015

I was going through my Pintrist boards as I noticed I had several pertaining to DIY planners, book making, and other very similar topics, so I took the time to combine them all into one MASSIVE Inspirational board. As you have to select each and every pin you want to move, I had the opportunity to revisit many of the pins I had long since forgotten about. This was one of them:

I think I will use this as my cover. I found some solid spongy drawer liner I was using as a work surface modifier which didn't make it into my new work room. I plan on using that as the cover of my "FauxDori" and will attempt to over it with the jean material. Now, I know I snagged a pair of jeans from my husband before he through them away, but where could they be...

Thursday, April 9, 2015

Before I became a stay-at-home parent, I worked a "9 to 5" in an office. I liked the stand alone, spiral-bound, floppy calendars my company would supply each year, but didn't like that I couldn't add to it or reorganize it like a you could with the FiloFax/Dayrunner ring-bound setup.Then I found Office Max & Martha Stewart's (Levenger has one as well) disc-binding system, which uses discs and specialty holes to create a really nice and very flexible binding system similar to (but SO much better than) a spiral bound book. After I found that, the search was on for a better calendar format. I had no use for the plan every hour of your day, I just answered the phones and "pushed paper." But still needed a calendar for meetings, events, appointments, etc. I watched countless YouTube videos of artists and others making their own out of this, that, and the other with brilliant colors, painted pictures and anything else you could think of. I didn't need all that either.Just recently I found the Hobonichi. A calendar format popular in Japan. It is more free form than I have ever seen and very much geared toward art journaling, list making, what have you. It's more of a way to document your life than plan it, and as a now stay-at-home parent, I don't need to plan much.But you can only get the Hobonichi in Japan, the only English version you can get is an A6 -not the A5 size I so love and adore, and it's a bound book, so you can't easily add/reorganize it. While I was searching YouTube, I also came across another binding system much like the spirals I love and with somewhat more flexibility. The Madori. And YouTube is filled with videos of people demonstrating how they made their faux items! (You can even make a "fauxbonichi" using a book from Barnes & Noble and drawing everything.)So, here's the plan:I'm going to make a "FauxDori" and fill it with "FauxBonichi" books, pocket inserts, and the like and attempt to film the process and post it to my YouTube channel (which has nothing on it) during the process.

Specs:SIZE: A5 - 5.5 x 813 calendar books (not all at once):- 1 book for each month: 1 month= 31 days /4 days per paper = roughly 8 paper per book.- 1 book of Hobonichi-style monthly planner pages.- Various other inserts as found on YouTube.I have an old 8.5 x 11 Pro Art sketch book I barely used for an art class I will deconstruct for paper. Covers have yet to be determined.Now I just have to figure out how to make a YouTube video without a video camera...

My mother-in-Law is the representative for her work in a group which meets several times a year. They wear name badges on lanyards during their conference.

I had made several lanyards for her a few years back, and just recently received a commission from one of the attendees for two lanyards.

I now have a new goal: I plan to make one lanyard each night, every night, until she comes to visit at the end of April. That should end up being about 20 lanyards.

These are the ones I've made so far:

The first two are the commissioned pieces, the last two are for my mother-in-law to take.

Now, on to WHY IT IS ALWAYS GOOD TO WORK ON A BEADING SURFACE:

When I was restringing one of the lanyards to add additional beads to the pattern in order to achieve the (roughly) 30 inches which is my standard, I dropped the string! If I had been working on my mats like I normally do, this would not have been a problem, but in an attempt to make the process move along more quickly, I took a "shortcut" letting the stopper end of the wire rest in my lap, allowing gravity to work in my favor. BAD IDEA! When I was almost done, the wire slipped through my fingers and the majority of the lanyard fell to the floor! The TILE floor. The sounds of beads bouncing is a beader's worst nightmare. I spent the better part of half an hour in a panic on the floor searching for beads. Under the shelves. Under the freezer. Under my work table. In boxes and around corners. Now normally I wouldn't worry much about dropped beads, but the particular piece I was working on was a re-work of a necklace I had been given and I didn't have any spares of most of the beads. Luckily, I was able to recover all of the beads I NEEDED to. I am now on the hunt for the material those mats are made from in order to make a larger mat for my work surface.